How our kids will change the world

I hear babies cry

I watch them grow

They'll learn much more

Than I'll ever know

And I think to myself

What a wonderful world

Yes, I think to myself

What a wonderful world

Louis Armstrong

I sit beside the fire and think

of people long ago

and people who will see a world

that I shall never know.

sung by Bilbo Baggins

Extravert or introvert, leader or led, consumer or producer: dreamer, author, creator, inventor, artist, engineer, scientist - what will today's kids become or see or use in their lifetime? Consider how the world has changed in mine, given my particular interest in electronics: the transistor was invented around the time of my birth in 1952. Without it none of modern electronics could exist. Since then Moore's Law has faithfully mapped the exponential increase in complexity and corresponding decrease in size and cost of all things electronic so that today the Cerebras WSE-2 is the largest computer chip ever built and the fastest AI processor on Earth boasting 2.6 trillion transistors, 850,000 AI-optimized cores, and 40 gigabytes of high performance on-wafer memory. 

Laptops, tablets, smart phones, the pocket calculator... I remember my father using a Ready Reckoner to laboriously calculate the cost of items sold in his DIY shop. Later he invested in a mechanical calculator. The first electronic pocket calculators only became available when I was in college: Sinclair and HP leading the way. Today every high-school kid has one.

Children today have from infancy taken the smart phone for granted. They navigate through its myriad features probably more quickly even than those who designed them. A far cry from the monochrome text-only displays or the teletype interface of computers when I was at college.

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It used to be said that the PSTN (global telephone network) was man's most complex invention with its  972 million fixed-line telephone subscriptions currently in use worldwide. Its inventor Graham Bell and his partners, Hubbard and Sanders, offered to sell the patent for the telephone outright to Western Union for $100,000, equal to $2.5 million today. The president of Western Union balked, countering that the telephone was nothing but a toy. 

That accolade has been eclipsed by other contenders e.g. the internet, or the nuclear fusion reactor in France that promises to 'solve the world’s energy problems for the next 30 million years' with a cost so far of $20bn. Meanwhile the PSTN, or more accurately the POTS, is due for retirement - in 2025 in the UK - ousted by VoIP. Then, with so much relying on it, what if the internet falls over?

In 1943 Thomas Watson, president of IBM, is credited with saying "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." To be fair, he was referring to the mammoth machines of his day, but still... And now the microprocessor (a computer on a chip), touted by some as man's most complex invention, is ubiquitous. Your average cell-phone's microprocessor has 'over 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that landed man on the moon 50 years ago'. 

Or is Dutch company ASML's 'extreme ultraviolet lithography machine' the most complex machine in the world, as required to manufacture today's silicon chips like Cerebras WSE-2? One arrived in Ireland in April 2022 at a cost of around $120m. 

Previously unbelievable inventions now enter stage often enough to avoid much fanfare. Did anyone notice exactly when the internet search engine came of age, or question how exactly does e.g. Google find results so quickly or can even predict what you want to look for?

Did anyone notice voice synthesis and recognition (as in Alexa, Siri, Hey Google, Cortana) making its debut and quickly becoming ubiquitous? Its adoption by the man-in-the-street seemed to happen overnight although it had been in development throughout my lifetime. Or what about the wonder of GPS navigation?

Here is a good summary of the history of human technology.

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What new technologies will come to fruition during the next generation?  Has AI already passed the Turing Test?  Will robots ever pass as human? Who knows what horrors human genetic engineering will come up with? Will nuclear fusion be tamed and become the major source of energy? Already it looks like self-driving vehicles will become the norm. Will space travel become accessible to the ordinary person? And what of the global warming and climate change scare; and all those many conspiracy theories that abound: will any actually pan out? Or the invention of anti-gravity where the story poses that pure noise—a completely random sequences of pulses—contains all possible messages and information, and that our ability to understand it depends on the mental filters that we’ve set up. Give a team of geniuses a source of raw noise and loosen up their filters, the story argues, and they can figure out just about anything, as long as they’re convinced that it’s possible.

Or will all these bricks, man's accomplishments, come tumbling down, Babel fashion, as hubris soars, pandemics scourge, or wars devastate? 

I yearn for these young lives and their futures. So fragile, vulnerable, impressionable, innocent, credulous. And yet the future depends wholly on how they will perform. But if, through it all, anyone were to put their lives in jeopardy... it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

Add to that globally declining population and its effect on society.

And quantum computing: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64492456